44 MIT SLOAN MANAGEMENT REVIEW FALL 2019 SLOANREVIEW.MIT.EDU
COLLABORATING WITH IMPACT: TEAM DYNAMICS
- You DO but don’t realize. The deepest undis-
cussables are collectively held unconscious behaviors.
These undiscussables are the most difficult to un-
cover. Members of the team may be aware of isolated
problems in their dynamic, but they cannot connect
the dots and infer root causes, so they jump to the
wrong conclusions about what is behind team ineffi-
ciencies and poor performance.
Consider this example: The CEO of a French
travel company complained about the dearth of de-
bate and lack of engagement within his team. We sat
in on one meeting, and he was right. The trouble
was, he was the problem. He was disengaged and eas-
ily distracted, and team members unconsciously got
the message that they were not important to him.
This is what psychologists call projection,
wherein we ascribe our own thoughts and feelings
to someone else. The CEO was disengaged, so he
thought the team was. Of course, the team quickly
replicated his behavior, becoming disengaged itself,
and the CEO had no idea he inspired it.
Teams instinctively develop defensive routines to
cope with anxiety, such as that generated by feeling
ignored or undervalued. This allows them to avoid
thinking about or even naming the underlying is-
sues. But it also blocks learning, preventing the team
from responding and adapting effectively to emerg-
ing challenges. Team members at the travel company
were unwittingly mimicking their leader; that was
their coping mechanism. If they were checked out,
they wouldn’t be bothered by the fact that he was.
As described by British psychotherapist Wilfred
Bion, unconscious and unacknowledged undiscuss-
ables manifest in seemingly unrelated team
dynamics — hence the difficulty connecting the
dots. At the travel company, there were hub-and-
spoke exchanges with the team leader that prevented
team members from interacting, conversations
dominated by the same two people, and a distract-
ing preoccupation with a fake foe. All these
interactions impeded critical self-review.^7 And they
disguised the true source of dysfunction.
Behavior patterns that emerge from anxiety
begin on an unconscious level and then become
part of “the way we do things.” Team members fall
into rigid roles, sit in the same chairs, and follow
rituals that impair their ability to question assump-
tions and get their jobs done.
Beginning the fix: Though unnoticed by the
team, warped interaction patterns may be readily
discernible to outsiders. The team leader can invite
a trusted adviser from another part of the organiza-
tion or an external facilitator to observe the team
and give feedback on communication habits, in-
cluding body language, who talks and how often,
whom people look at when they talk, who inter-
rupts whom, who or what is blamed when things
go wrong, what is not spoken about, who stays si-
lent, and whose comments are ignored.
A trained observer can then engage in what MIT
Sloan School of Management’s pioneering organiza-
tional psychologist Edgar Schein calls humble inquiry,
in which the aim is to elicit information and feelings
important to the team’s mission. The questioner’s
outsider status allows for naive, unthreatening ques-
tioning of the unconscious processes at play.^8 The
Five Whys technique (asking “Why?” at least five
times), made famous in Six Sigma methodology,
can help the outsider drill down to deeper levels and
surface what the team is avoiding.
Prior to beginning our work at the travel company,
we asked to film one of the top team’s meetings (this is
part of our usual process). We saw that there were lots
of side conversations. People slouched and fiddled
with their phones during presentations. The impres-
sion was of a group going through the motions.
Then, we showed the team a series of clips focus-
ing on all the occasions the CEO was distracted
by his phone. Initial amusement turned to embar-
rassment as the sequence ran on and on, but weThe good news is that destructive and unconscious
dynamics lose their power when they become visible
and a topic for discussion.